


you're just a line in a song

by nymphae



Series: the hundred [5]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: (so much angst), Angst, F/M, Road Trip, Rock Band AU, bi clarke, like .2 seconds of clarke/lexa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-12
Updated: 2015-02-12
Packaged: 2018-03-11 23:21:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3336563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nymphae/pseuds/nymphae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clarke's pretty sure miles of empty highway, dive bars, and guitar-string calluses is the right way to spend her twenties.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you're just a line in a song

**Author's Note:**

> I read so many rock band AUs that I had to try my hand at this. In this world everyone's bitter and angry. I'm bitter and angry.

**July 11  
** **The Middle of Nowhere**

Clarke is somewhere between dreams when she slams into consciousness. Literally. She peels her face off of the back of the driver’s seat with a growl and glowers at Raven, who's grinning in that way that makes Clarke want to punch her.

“Rise and shine, Sleeping Beauty,” she singsongs. She takes her foot off the brake.

Clarke pulls herself out of the burrow of blankets and guitar cases and stray clothes in the backseat so she can peer outside, where nothing but shadows and silhouettes are streaking by in blurs. The clock on the dashboard reads 2:02 AM. She drags callused fingers through her greasy hair, rolls her neck against knots, and sighs. “Where are we?”

“Purgatory,” deadpans Octavia in the passenger seat. Her phone is illuminating her face, throwing it into sharp shadows that make her look even more tired. She’s wearing Clarke’s sweatpants and has her hair in a knot on top of her head.

“Like, twenty miles from San Diego,” Raven translates, eye-roll evident in her voice.

Clarke stifles a yawn and rubs at her eyes. She hasn’t seen a bed in a week. The last time she bathed, it was in a gas station bathroom. She’s pretty sure miles of empty highway, dive bars, and guitar-string calluses is the right way to spend her twenties.

“Is it my turn?” she asks.

“I think I can hear colors,” Raven says in reply.

Octavia slides her feet off the dashboard and tucks them under her without looking up.  “Pull over.” She’s texting someone called L and has been for several days. She casts a fleeting glance back at Clarke. “Want a Red Bull?”

 

**October 19 (Nine Months Ago)  
Phoenix **

Clarke doesn’t normally bring girls back to her apartment (especially not girls who get her kicked out of cheap indie concerts) but it’s been a solid four hours of friendship with this one and she's pretty sure that she’s not going to get murdered in her sleep. Octavia may look like she could palm you ecstasy at a party, but she’s friendly enough. Her way of apologizing is saying, “Want to get Taco Bell? I don’t want to brag, but I have eight dollars.”

Despite what’ll be a nasty set of bruises on her arms—Octavia doesn’t look very heavy, but it’s not easy to forget the sheer force she packs when you break her fall from a seven-foot stage—Clarke likes this girl. She’s brash and she’s blunt and she likes _Room on Fire_ just as much as Clarke does. She also fields personal questions like it’s her job; she expertly steers the subject away from past and family, flicks up an eyebrow dangerously when Clarke tries to push it. Clarke’s sort of reminded of herself two years ago. It’s clear that like Clarke circa 2012, Octavia doesn’t want to go home.

She looks at everything in Clarke’s apartment with the wary, interested eye of someone unused to luxury. With her shredded tights and short-shorts, her makeup dark and intense, she looks comically out of place in the conservative front room. (There’s a copy of _Starry Night_ and one of Clarke’s originals on the wall, a couch barely long enough to lie on, a small window that’s almost always shuttered. Everything’s muted color and negative space.)

“Looks like I should’ve made you pay for dinner,” is all she says, with a half-grin that’s impossible not to return.

When Clarke comes out of the bathroom, Octavia is in her bedroom, inspecting the papers littering her nightstand.

“You write songs?” she asks, raising an eyebrow.

Clarke flushes. “A little,” she admits.

Octavia plops down on Clarke’s bed, high-heeled boots and all, and flips her long dark hair over her shoulder. “Play me something,” she says.

 

**July 12  
San Diego**

Clarke steps back from the mic as Octavia shreds the last stretch of the song, sweat dripping into her eyes. She normally likes venues like this, tiny and packed, sound reverberating off the walls so she can hear an echo of herself singing, but right now she wants to shower and crash. (God, she really wants to shower.)

Mostly she wants to fling her guitar at whoever’s spouting entitled male nonsense at them from the back of the crowd.

Octavia meets Clarke’s eyes before she puts her lips to the mic. “This one goes out to the asshole in the back,” she says, voice sultry and a little raspy. “This is ‘Cat Call.’”

In response Raven leaps into the rolling, rumbling intro that Clarke loves about this song, and when her cue comes in Clarke adds her defining strumming, grinning in the drawn-out pause just before Octavia kicks in her bassline and her rendition of the first verse.

_I’m lookin’ good tonight_  
 _I’m feelin’ good tonight_  
 _I’m ready to kill tonight_  
 _So whistle at me one more time_

Clarke’s buzzing by the time they head backstage, chased by the echo of the music and the applause that always sounds to her louder than it probably is. She slings an arm around Raven’s sweaty neck and pulls her close to push a kiss to the side of her face, then does the same to Octavia.

“I love you,” she says loudly, over the ringing in her ears.

Octavia grins wide and bright and Raven’s eyes crinkle up at the corners, and Clarke forgets all about home and her mom and everyone else who left or died. She finds a good spot between Raven’s equipment and a couple of amps in the back of the van to settle in for the night, and she doesn’t dream for the first time in a while.

 

**October 29 (Nine Months Ago)  
Phoenix**

Clarke’s just about to text Octavia again when the front door slams.

“You’re late,” she calls into the house. “Common courtesy says to _call_ if you’re going to be—”

“How the hell did you get in here?”

Clarke jerks, her pick slipping off the guitar strings, and blinks up at the stranger in the doorway. He’s very tall. Cute if you like them shaggy-haired and angry-looking with stern, hard mouths. Her first thought is that she’s been sitting in the wrong house for forty minutes because they just happen to use the same fake rock as Octavia does for hiding keys. But then it clicks. _Brother. History buff. Overprotective. Home for a few months._

“Uh,” she says. “Hi. I’m Clarke.”

“Okay,” Octavia’s brother says impatiently. “How did you get in here?”

His rudeness catches her off-guard. “Octavia told me where the spare is,” she says.

The guy huffs. “Of course she did,” he mutters. He gives her a more scrutinizing look. “You’re her new friend. The rich girl.”

“I’m not rich,” she replies.

That makes him raise an eyebrow. “You’re more than a little Beverly Hills for this side of town, princess.”

Clarke gives him a dirty look. “Funnily enough,” she says, “my finances aren’t my defining quality.”

“Right,” says the guy, and that hard mouth of his quirks at one corner in a way that takes the edge off of Clarke’s irritation somehow. “Try to keep it down, _Clarke_.”

She’s never heard him referred to as anything other than _my brother_ (words sometimes sandwiching others like _idiot_ or _stupid_ but always said with a kind of rough-edged fondness that seems like a well-kept secret between siblings), so all she can say is “Fuck off” as darkly as possible.

He huffs out something like laughter as he slinks off into the house.

 

**July 15  
On the Road**

They get weird looks when they trudge into McDonald’s at six a.m. greasy-haired and yawning. It’s to be expected. They look sort of homeless. Clarke feels like they’re emitting a stench that could kill everything within a ten-foot radius.

“I feel disgusting,” Octavia complains. She’s eaten her two McMuffins and has moved on to Raven’s rubbery pancakes. Raven is asleep. (Clarke pities her. She had the most uncomfortable spot in the van.)

“That’s is what rock ‘n’ roll feels like,” Clarke says, staring at her cell. She has two text messages and an email. One of each is from her mom. She deletes them with only a fraction of the remorse she used to feel.

“Yeah, well.” Octavia lifts up one arm and sniffs. “I haven’t seen a deeper pool of water than a toilet bowl in _way_ too long.” She elbows Raven, who snorts awake. “Let’s go to the beach.”

“Beach,” Raven repeats, yawns. Octavia makes a big show of wrinkling up her nose. “Oh, shut up, B.O. Queen.”

Clarke laughs. They clear up and drive until they hit sand, and then jump into the cold water in their underwear. Raven and Octavia keep tackling each other, laughing and screaming. Clarke just floats. It feels nice to be weightless for a while. It’s fleeting, though. After about two minutes Raven’s hand wraps around her foot and drags her down, down, down.

 

**November 11 (Eight Months Ago)  
Phoenix**

The other woman is strong. That’s the first thought that Clarke has, because the _other woman_ (as Clarke’s come to know her) is staring at her—recognizing her—unblinkingly, unflinchingly. She’s very pretty. But Clarke knows this already; she also knows that Raven Reyes is the best mechanic in town and has over five hundred friends on Facebook.

Raven says bluntly, “You’re Clarke.” She’s narrow-eyed, hand tight around her backpack’s strap. A pair of drumsticks peek out.

“Yeah,” Clarke admits, eyeing them. Maybe in another life she would’ve been worried about being stabbed with one of them, but now she’s seeing an opportunity. There are curious eyes on them—Finn Collins’s two girlfriends in the history section of the library—but Clarke ignores them. She offers what she hopes is a friendly smile. “You want to get a beer?”

 

It’s past nine when the slamming door heralds Bellamy’s entrance. He seems unsurprised to see Clarke in his kitchen; she’s been spending more time here than at her own place lately. But when Raven says, “Yeah, I can work with this,” he stops short in the doorway to stare. She stares right back.

“Who’s she?” he asks.

Clarke cracks open her second beer on the counter, which she knows he hates. “This is Raven. She’s my boyfriend’s girlfriend.”

“Hey,” says Raven.

Bellamy’s eyes flick between them in mild puzzlement. “What’s she doing here?”

“She’s our new drummer.”

He blinks, then his expression turns exasperated. “That’s the worst fucking idea I’ve ever heard,” he tells her bluntly.

Raven just smiles, tilts her beer to her mouth. “You haven’t heard me play.”

 

They cram into Octavia’s narrow bed to sleep that night, all of them half drunk. It’s surprisingly comfortable, even with one of her arms pinned under Raven and the other swinging off the edge. She's had a hard time sleeping alone lately, so it’s kind of nice, even when she wakes up by hitting the floor. She groans, loud and drawn out.

On the bed, Octavia grumbles and pulls the blankets over her head, officially barring Clarke’s reentrance. Raven is dead to the world.

Clarke gets to her feet and stumbles bleary-eyed into the kitchen in search for food. Her vision’s blurry, but she thinks she can make out the toaster and the microwave. She stubs her toe on a chair and hisses. “ _Fuck_.”

“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?”

Clarke jumps. Octavia’s brother is standing in the doorway in sweatpants and a smirk and nothing else. Clarke wishes she were wearing pants. “Coffee?” is all her brain can spit out.

Bellamy points at the counter, where a full pot is sitting. Clarke’s body lurches forward automatically, hands fumbling to pour and bring the mug to her mouth so she can get her fix. She can’t function unless caffeinated. Her phone is sitting on the counter. Against better judgment, she unlocks it. 3 missed calls from Finn. She sighs.

From the doorway Bellamy fixes her with a long look. “Are you okay, Clarke?”

“I’m fine,” Clarke says. “My boyfriend cheated. On someone else. With me. Now she’s my drummer. Everything’s fine.” It goes quiet except for the clinking of her spoon.

“You’re good,” Bellamy says into the silence.

She peers at him over her mug. “What?”

“I heard you last night,” he says, avoiding her eyes. It might just be Clarke’s fuzzy brain, but he’s not giving off the strong douche vibes that he usually is. “You sound good.”

She frowns. “Thanks,” she replies uneasily.

When she looks up again, he’s gone.

 

**July 17  
Long Beach**

“Are you Clarke Griffin?”

Clarke peers under her arm at the guy standing behind her. She sighs and crawls backwards out of the van, checking her watch in the process. Half an hour to the start of their next show. “Who’s asking?” she says lightly.

“I’m Dax.” He offers a smile. “With _The Ark Daily._ I just have a couple of questions.”

That’s obvious. He’s got that glint in his eyes, the falseness behind his smile, the casual posture, and the neutral clothes. Clarke knows reporters like the back of her hand. She hates reporters. But this is band publicity, not her father’s public hanging (so to speak), so she smiles back.

“Nice to meet you,” she says. “Ask away.”

All’s well and good—standard questions about how she met the others, how she writes a song, what the inspiration is behind hits like “Lead Tongue” ( _you’ve got a lead tongue, baby / but that’s no_ excuse) and “Fury” ( _hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? / honey, hell hath no fury like ME_ ), what prompted her to leave school, yadda yadda yadda. And then—

“The others mentioned there was a fourth member,” Dax says. He’s looking down at his notes and not at her so he misses the look that flits across her face. He smiles again. “Any comment on why he’s no longer around?”

Clarke says, very carefully, “He’s very capable. But sometimes artists can’t fit in the same room.”

She reads his article when it comes out.

_Frontwoman Clarke Griffin stands at five-foot-nothing in ill-fitting jeans and a pair of Converse that has seen serious battle. I fear her instantly. She is smiley and charming right up until I mention the not-so-old wound that almost ended The Delinquents before it started. By that, of course, I mean the departure of missing member Bellamy Blake, who was “integral” in the writing process in late 2013 / early 2014 and is credited with hits like “Anarchy” and “Black Sheep.” It was announced—suddenly and without explanation—in early April that Blake would not be participating in The Delinquents’ 2014 tour, but rumor has it…_

She shuts the laptop so hard that Raven pulls out an earbud and frowns at her from across the table. Thankfully, she doesn’t comment.

 

**December 9 (Seven Months Ago)  
Phoenix**

The days run by in solid routine. Clarke and Raven stop at Octavia’s at least twice during the week and almost every weekend to hole up in her room and write, mess around with the music and think. It’s hard to make the pieces fit. Raven keeps saying they’re missing something.

Bellamy drifts in and out of the house at odd hours—apparently he bartends at some seedy place downtown—listening in on what they’re doing and offering criticism that is at first irritating and then valuable. Octavia mentions his band’s fallen out; something about one of his bandmates going to jail.

“He gets antsy when he’s not writing,” she remarks.

Sure enough, Clarke makes the mistake of leaving her lyrics and notes out on the counter and finds them covered in Bellamy’s messy scrawl.

“What the hell?” Clarke splutters. “I was working on this!”

“And now it’s finished,” Bellamy says imperiously. When she stares at him incredulously he rolls his eyes, shuts the fridge. “Look, are you pissed that I ruined it or are you pissed that I didn’t?” He raises his eyebrows arrogantly at her silence. Clarke wants to slap his beer out of his hand, especially when she realizes he’s right.

An hour later she slaps another song down in front of him, seething because she was outvoted completely. “Welcome to the band,” she says darkly.

“Thanks, princess,” he says, and his grin makes her jaw clench.

 

**July 19  
On the Road**

She thinks about it. Calling him. She hasn’t heard anything about him since before the tour, before everything became in-ears and hot lights and yelling crowds. Octavia hasn’t mentioned him and Clarke doesn’t want to ask. But she can’t help thinking that he’s supposed to _be_ here while they speed down the highways with the windows down, rolling his eyes at the fact that Raven won’t stop blasting Taylor Swift and denying that he knows all the words to “Blank Space.”

She stares at her phone, sets her teeth on her bottom lip. It’s just a number on the screen. It doesn’t even have a name anymore. She deleted his contact months ago, but still knows his number by heart.

“Stop!” Raven yells, slapping Octavia’s hand away from the stereo.

“I will crash this car if I have to listen to this one more time,” Octavia warns.

“Clarke, help!”

Clarke sighs and reaches over to yank the aux cord out of Raven’s phone. She doesn’t call him.

 

**December 18 (Eight Months Ago)  
Phoenix**

“This is the last time,” Clarke says in the ten seconds she’s got before Bellamy finishes getting his shirt off and she goes fuzzy.

He emerges open-mouthed, hair tousled, cheeks flushed, and gives her a skeptical look as he crowds her against the counter. (She goes so, so fuzzy.) “You said that the last five times,” he says, amused.

“Yeah, but—” she pauses to breathe in sharply when he gets his hands under sweater, kisses her like he really wants her to shut up. “Last time.” She means to sound warning, but it comes out like a question.

He hoists her onto the counter so he can stand between her knees, so she can reach between them and hook her fingers into the loops of his jeans. “We’ll see,” he mutters, and she likes him best like this, all exposed and warm. He tugs the sweater off. “O’s home in half an hour,” he says to the skin at her throat. “Want to see if we can beat our record?”

Clarke winds her fingers in his hair and laughs.

 

**July 22  
Santa Barbara**

“Someone’s going to need to take over for her,” Clarke says in the waiting room.

Raven stops her pacing to stare at her, and her mouth does that sneering thing it used to do all the time before they were friends, before they were sisters. “She broke her wrist,” she says bitingly. “Turn it off for a fucking second, Clarke.”

And Clarke feels guilty. She doesn’t do well with scares like these. She’s seen Octavia jump and fall and dive off of like, thirty stages, but this one was… _bad._ Seeing that girl’s bones break was…

Octavia emerges from the emergency room doors looking pale but triumphant. Clarke hugs her hard, feels _really_ guilty for being selfish and cold right up until they’re packed in the van and pulling away from the curb and Octavia, inspecting her new blue cast in the flashing streetlights, says, “We need to call him.”

Clarke clenches her jaw, glares at the road ahead. She knew this was coming. She had hoped nobody would say it, that nobody would dare bring it up. She should have known better.

Raven says, “You sure? His head practically exploded last time.”

“Oh,” Octavia says blankly. Her painkillers must have kicked in. “No, not for…this.” She raises her arm. “I mean yeah, but—to play my parts.” She looks at Clarke, who doesn’t look back. “We can’t cancel the tour because I did something stupid.”

Clarke sighs quietly. “Octavia, there are other people who can learn your parts.”

“No one better than him,” Octavia insists. In the passenger seat she’s pulling the wide doe eyes, which she normally doesn’t because she thinks they make her look too young.

“Well,” Raven says in the backseat, “he did write a lot of them.”

Silence falls, heavy under the added weight of two pairs of eyes on her. She’s backed into a corner. She was really hoping this wouldn’t happen, that it wouldn’t be down to her.

They approach a red light, which stares Clarke down like an accusing, unblinking eye, and she brakes a little too hard. “Do it,” she tells the windshield.

“Clarke?”

“Call Bellamy,” Clarke says.

 

**December 23 (Eight Months Ago)  
Phoenix**

She wakes up with a pounding headache. Her underwear is on the other side of the room, and she’s only got her head and one arm through her t-shirt. Bellamy is a mass of too-warm flesh beside her, one arm thrown over his eyes. She’s too hungover to care that the door’s wide open, that they’re probably out in the open now.

She wanders into the kitchen squinting, where Octavia and Raven are sitting, looking only slightly less pained than Clarke feels. Raven’s the first to spot her, but she doesn’t bother lifting her cheek from the table. “Hey,” she says.

“Mmph,” Clarke grumbles.

“Hey there,” Octavia says with a grin. “You finally did my brother.”

Clarke has not had any coffee, and therefore cannot form words. Knowing this, Octavia holds out her own mug.

“You literally have zero defense,” she says, not even waiting for Clarke to caffeine-up. “You’re wearing his favorite shirt and you have hickeys. Plural.”

Clarke squints, says nothing.

Octavia adds, “Also, we’ve all known for weeks.”

“I can’t believe you did it on this table,” Raven says. She makes no effort to lift her face from it, is probably too tired to do so. “We eat off this table.”

Clarke just leans against the counter, slouching, breathing in coffee steam. “How are you so alert?” she mutters.

“I have an excellent liver,” Octavia says, too loudly.

Raven groans and covers her face.

“Are you dating now?” Octavia asks.

Clarke stares at her over the mug, unable to answer for several reasons.

“Please stop talking,” Bellamy groans. He’s standing in the doorway, his hair sticking up in all directions.

Octavia repeats the question. Clarke wants to punch her.

Bellamy stares at his sister. He shuffles over to Clarke and bends down to kiss her on the mouth pointedly, then steals her coffee and disappears back into his room. The three girls track his movements in various stages of shock.

“Huh,” says Clarke. She follows him before anyone else can speak.

 

**July 24  
San Luis Obispo**

They’re so exhausted that they just pile on the beds the second they get into the motel room. Clarke only gets one boot off before she knocks out on the covers, and she dreams about her dad.

She’s not the first to wake up the next day; it’s noon and Octavia’s taken over the bathroom while Raven picks at her hair, so Clarke heads out for bagels with her hood drawn up. She’s been recognized twice on the street—once as a band member, once as a former scandal member—so she’s hoping it’s enough to melt into the crowds and become one of the many small blonde girls in California. (It is.)

The boy behind the counter at the Starbucks down the street is cute. He smiles at Clarke even though she’s got bags carved under her eyes and her hair is a rat’s nest. She doesn’t give him a second glance, just clutches the noisy bags and three coffees to her chest and makes a quick exit.

“Who’s Matt and why does he want me to call him?”

Clarke stares at Raven, unable to answer through a mouth full of muffin. The other girl’s raising thin eyebrows, showing Clarke the numbers scrawled on the side of her coffee cup.

“Um,” says Clarke.

“You should do it,” Raven says.

“I don’t think so.”

Raven gives her a soft look. “Clarke—”

Octavia comes out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam. Clarke looks away, thinks, _I don’t think so._

 

**January 3 (Seven Months Ago)  
Phoenix**

Clarke has said _I love you_ twice already today. She said it to Octavia immediately after getting the call from their agent. She yelled it to Raven in the backyard. She kissed them both, loudly and obnoxiously on whichever parts of their faces she could reach. She grabs Bellamy by the collar the second he steps through the door; he almost drops the six-pack he’s holding.

“And _you_ ,” she says, grinning at his bewildered face. She yanks him down to her height so she can kiss him hard on the mouth. “I _really_ love you,” she declares.

(Octavia will later describe in great detail the look on Bellamy’s face, because Clarke will only half-remember.)

It all sort of goes out the window when they stumble back to Bellamy’s room, laughing and tripping over shoes and jeans. Clarke drops her bra somewhere in the hallway but it’s not a huge loss. They’re lying tangled up in sheets and each other when she realizes he’s saying something.

“Wha?” she mutters. She’s halfway to dreaming.

He stops, says (so quietly she’s not really sure he even does), “I _really_ love you.”

She smiles into his skin.

 

**July 27  
Bakersfield**

She sees him long before anyone else does, which is both a blessing and a curse.

At least this way she has a second to prepare herself, but the sight of him is kind of like a punch in the gut. She spies his half-shadowed form in the doorway, recognizes immediately the unruly curls of his hair and the slope of his shoulders from all the way across the room. She’d know him anywhere.

Octavia is the next one to spot him; she shoots up from her chair, waves her arms. “Hey, dickhead!” she calls. “Over here!”

He sidles over with a grin spread across his face. “Brat,” he teases, and then stifles her comeback by dragging her into a hug. The scene does something funny to Clarke’s stomach. The bond between siblings has always been something of a mystery to her; theirs is especially perplexing, the way they can bite and snap at each other but hug like _this_ —faces pressed into each other and grip so tight it looks like it hurts. He kisses his sister’s head, reaches for Raven next. His gaze is a little sad when it settles on Clarke.

They don’t hug. They stare at each other. The others watch them warily, hoping for a handshake instead of a fistfight but unsure which they’ll be dealing with.

“Clarke,” he says.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she says. She makes sure to walk, not run.

Raven finds her staring at herself in the mirror, face dewy with cold water. She presses her back to the door, her dark eyes bright and a little judgmental (but enough that Clarke can ignore it).

“Shut up,” Clarke tells her.

“Are you going to be able to do this?” Raven asks, calm and flat. “Because if you’re not, you need to tell me right now.”

Clarke isn’t sure. Everything feels like turmoil and teenage angst. But she takes a breath, and she says, “Of course I am.”

 

**April 23 (Two Months Ago)  
Phoenix**

He’s pissed.

He’s been pissed for a while. Clarke’s not stupid, and she knows him far too well to miss all the signs. The car’s eerily silent on the way back from the Blake house. At first she thinks it’s just because of Lincoln, because he’s twice Octavia’s size and maybe even her age and because the thought of her growing up is too terrifying. She’s wrong.

They fight, and it’s vicious and explosive and pretty much everything they’ve been sweeping under the rug for the past few months. He calls her self-righteous. She calls him emotionally hobbled. He brings up her mom and the message about med school on the answering machine that Clarke forgot to delete. She gets defensive. It takes a sharp left turn into the money—it’s _always_ about the money—and the classism and how Clarke’s still living off of her trust fund and has _med school_ holding a place for her. Her neighbors get to hear the choicest bits.

“Stop trying to make my decision for me!” Clarke yells, fists clenched. “I don’t even know if I want to _go!_ ”

“Of course you do!” he sneers. He’s got his war face on, the one he used to wield before they fell down this rabbit hole. (She’d felt good about peeling it away like a mask, seeing something else underneath, but now it seems impenetrable.) “You were never going to _stay_ , Clarke. We both knew you’d always go home to your Ivy League family—”

"You're the only one who's ever cared about that!" she shoots back. _  
_

"Really? Because I wasn't the one who got embarrassed when—"

“Fuck you!” she snaps. "I wasn’t going to go because I thought I had something here—I thought I had _you_.” She has to stop for air, and inhaling is sobering. She’s not yelling anymore when she says, “But maybe I don’t anymore.”

There is a long and heavy silence before he says, very quietly, “Maybe.”

They stare at each other. Clarke’s wondering how just this morning she’d wrapped her arms around him and pressed her face into his back, told him she loved him.

He scrubs a hand over his eyes, says, “You should really, really go, Clarke.”

“Fuck you,” she says again, but it betrays the fact that she’s close to tears. “This is my apartment.”

He just looks at her, and she realizes that's not what he meant. “Then I will,” he says. He sounds as tired as she feels. He doesn’t storm out, he walks. Maybe it’s so she has time to stop him, but she doesn’t.

The door slams.

 

**July 29  
Morro Bay**

Clarke cannot properly describe the screaming that erupts when Bellamy steps onto the stage, slinging his guitar over his neck. She forgets that he was popular in The Rebels, that he’s _recognizable_ and _valuable_ in the music industry, that this is how it was supposed to be before they fell apart.

He fits too easily into this. He plays Octavia’s parts—his parts—like he’s been practicing them every day. Like he never left. Clarke flashes back to cold days in his garage and numb fingers and hates it, hates “Dreamer” and that he once hummed it against her skin.

_I don’t dream of better days, I just dream of you  
Oh, but the best days are when I don’t have to_

_I’m a dreamer_  
 _Please wake me up_  
 _I’ll never leave her_  
 _Please wake me up_

A couple of girls ask him to sign their stomachs after the show. She feels sick.

 

**April 23 (Two Months Ago)  
Phoenix**

She destroys every piece of ceramic lying out in her kitchen and then gets so drunk that _dead_ sounds really good to her upon waking the next day.

Her phone’s blowing up with texts, all from Raven and Octavia. She only reads the last two.

(9:27 AM) Raven R: Pick up your phone  
(9:51 AM) Raven R: He’s gone

 

**July 30  
On the Road**

When Clarke emerges from the gas station bathroom, hair damp on the back of her t-shirt, the sun’s hot and half the day’s already gone. She feels restless. She wants to get moving so they don’t have to sleep in the van—she can’t sleep on her guitar case again. But they're loitering in the heat; Raven's at the counter inside and Octavia's throwing junk food into a basket, both slow and lazy. She sighs, gets back in the car.

He’s taking up the backseat, but he moves his feet just enough so she can fit in her spot. He only looks at her once, emotionlessly, before closing his eyes again and leaning his head against the window. He’s tanner now, freckles still stark and obvious. Clarke hates them where she once loved them.

“Thanks,” she says suddenly. He opens his eyes to look at her warily. “For dropping everything.”

He doesn’t reply right away. Their history hangs heavy and palpable between them.  “I didn’t do it for you, princess,” he says at last.

Clarke turns away, pretending it’s the sun that hurts her eyes.

 

**June 8 (One Month Ago)  
Phoenix**

The weeks before tour are spent rehearsing every song to death, messing around with arrangements and tweaking things last-minute. Clarke has set foot in the Blake house again. Octavia has stopped eyeing her in that uneasy, half-angry way. (Clarke gets it. He’s her brother. She’s her friend. It’s hard.) Clarke has finally conquered the urge to re-enter his number into his phone.

She’s hunting for the keys to the van in the living room—shoving her hands into the cushions of the ragged couch, crawling to poke under the carpet, cursing her memory—when she spies Octavia’s ankle boots in the doorway. She sits up. “Have you seen the keys?” she asks.

Octavia is staring at her, mouth set in a very familiar way. “You need to fix it,” she says firmly. When Clarke just looks blankly back at her she crosses her arms. “You’re miserable. Both of you. You haven’t been sleeping. He’s been trying to drink Vegas dry. You need. To fix it.”

A long pause rolls.

Clarke says, “Have you seen the keys?”

 

**July 31  
Palo Alto**

Bellamy’s old friend Miller lives in a fixer-upper that neither he nor the other three guys living with him ever intend to fix. It reeks of dude and the pipes leak, but they need a place to stay for the night and the pros outweigh the cons. Pros include: Clarke’s favorite beer and a party. She doesn’t have a problem.

She gets drunk. Really drunk. Like _the week after her dad died_ kind of drunk. (Those days remain blurry and better forgotten.) So drunk that when she finds herself falling into an old pattern with Bellamy. They smash toiletries and picture frames in their haste to stumble onto some kind of soft surface and he almost drops her, knocks her shoulder hard enough into a wall that it might bruise. They end up in someone’s bed eventually, Clarke’s shirt rucked up around her armpits and her underwear falling down her thighs, and she’s thinking this is a dream right up until he pauses, mouth hovering over the dip in her hipbone.

She grumbles. “C’mon,” she mutters, tugs on his hair too hard. She hasn’t fucked in _so long_.

“Do you still—?” he starts, and then stops.

Clarke wishes she could sever the connection between them with a pair of scissors. His mouth presses to her skin again, not kissing or sucking, just—touching. She thinks about lying, about not answering at all. But her mouth opens. “Yeah,” she says. “I still love you, you fucking bag of dicks.”

When they kiss, it’s a harsh mess of teeth and tongue and she hopes petulantly in her drunken haze that it hurts him as much as it does her.

 

Miller’s nice. Clarke didn’t really get a chance to talk to him between putting down her guitar and guzzling beer last night, but in the daylight she can see that he’s got a soft sort of presence and a trustworthy face. He’s obviously been friends with Bellamy for a long time; they were acting like long-lost brothers all night. She wonders why she never met him before.

They’re the only ones awake. They sit on the porch and watch the empty street in silence for a minute, spoons clinking against bowls. It’s late morning. The sun is thankfully hidden behind some clouds, but it makes everything look washed-out and sad.

“You okay, Clarke?” Miller asks. They’re strangers, but it’s nice of him to ask, even if it’s unwelcome.

“I’m fine,” she says.

He says, “I never thought you two would break up, you know.”

She sighs. “Miller,” she starts, but he holds up a hand.

“I know it’s not my business,” he says. “It’s just… He seemed really serious about you.”

“Well,” Clarke says. “He told me differently.”

Miller chews a mouthful of cornflakes thoughtfully. “You probably already know,” he says slowly, “but Bellamy thinks he has to protect the people he loves from everything, including him.”

Clarke says nothing.

 

**June 10 (One Month Ago)  
Phoenix**

“…he won’t even answer my calls anymore,” Octavia’s voice says.

“She won’t tell me what happened,” Raven murmurs. “She shuts down every time.”

There’s silence.

“I’m calling Nate,” Octavia decides. “He’ll listen to—”

“Hey,” says Clarke.

The girls jump, and fall into silence. They don’t try to make excuses. Clarke loves that about them. She reaches between them to grab the cereal box and makes her exit, ignoring the murmuring that strikes up in her absence.

 

**August 2  
San Francisco**

“You threw your guitar,” Bellamy says. “You _threw_ it. At the _crowd_.”

She hates him. He’s standing in front of her with his arms crossed, mouth stern, like he’s in control, like she’s eleven and broke a vase. She’d give anything to have this conversation with someone else, but Raven and Octavia went out hours ago and it’s just them. “It’s fine,” she says. “Don’t lecture me.”

“It’s not fine,” he bites out.

“This is my band,” Clarke snaps. “You’re not my agent or my dad. Don’t lecture me.”

He stares. “Look,” he says, with thinly veiled exasperation, “just wait until tour’s over to throw your fucking tantrum, okay?”

 _“Me?”_ she says. “Me, a tantrum? Do you even hear yourself?”

“Don’t make this about us,” he warns.

Clarke wants to laugh, but instead she scoffs. “Shut the fuck up.”

“Don’t—”

“I will punch you,” she says. “If you don’t shut up, I will punch you, and _I need my hand._ ”

He steps closer. “You think this isn’t hard for me, too?” he hisses. “You think it’s easy being around you? You’re everywhere. We’re supposed to _move on_. The least we can do is finish this fucking tour without ruining it—for my sister, for Raven.”

“You’re such an asshole,” Clarke spits.

“Suck it up, princess,” he sneers.

The next second they’re kissing, and she forgets herself. But then she lashes out with two hands and shoves him as hard as she can. They stare at each other, breathing heavily. It takes every ounce of her willpower to walk away.

 

**August 8  
Oakland**

“Last time,” he says.

She doesn’t even slow down, just finishes yanking her jeans up her thighs. “You said that the last two times,” she replies.

He doesn’t speak right away. He looks sallower than usual, but it’s probably just the lights in this Burger King bathroom. “Is it even possible?” he asks. She pauses, because it’s too weird, too vulnerable a question coming from him. “To stop, I mean.”

“Of course it is,” Clarke mutters, even though she doesn’t know if that’s true.

He reaches out; she thinks maybe he’s going to touch her, but he’s just holding out her panties for her to take. She realizes with a shock that he was the one who bought them for her an eternity ago. She looks at them, at him, then turns and walks out.

From the counter Raven watches Bellamy trudge out to the van with narrowed eyes. She looks at Clarke pointedly.

“Don’t,” Clarke warns.

“You can’t,” Raven says, just as warningly, “keep breaking each other.” When Clarke doesn’t reply she glares. “You have to _choose_ , Clarke. With him or without him. In or out. It’ll fuck everything up again.”

Clarke says nothing. Their order gets called.

 

**August 13  
Berkeley**

They meet up with The Grounders a couple of hours before tonight's show so they can shake hands and swap names. Clarke's listened to their stuff before—it's not really her style, but she likes Lincoln's deep voice and the riffs that Anya writes, and she's always thought their EP was really good.

Lincoln's as quiet and kindly as she remembers; once he disentangles himself from Octavia, he gets up to hug her. He's about the friendliest member. Lexa could kill someone with that glare of hers. Indra speaks only when spoken to. Anya's got a gun for a tongue. They're all scary and intimidatingly beautiful. The crowd at the show loves them, and if they didn't butt heads with Bellamy and Raven at every turn, Clarke would suggest that they open for them more often.

Tequila helps. All it takes is a few shots to get get Indra and Raven to stop bickering at each other. A few more and Clarke and Lexa become best friends. A couple after that and they're watching Anya and Bellamy dance with all the morbid interest of watching a train wreck. Not because it's awful—Anya's been dancing since she was eleven and Bellamy's always graceful-but because she's so beautiful it kind of hurts to look at her (at least when Clarke's this drunk) and because, well. Clarke doesn't really finish that thought.

She winds up in the bathroom splashing her face. When Lexa comes in and looks at her in amusement she says, with a half-hearted laugh, "I shouldn't have done those shots."

In response, Lexa kisses her. Clarke sees it coming; Lexa puts her hands on Clarke's shoulders and leans in slowly so that she has time to say something, but she doesn't. It's a nice sort of kiss, soft mouths and fluttering eyelashes. After a minute Lexa pulls back.

Clarke says, "Why?"

Lexa gives her an enigmatic smile. "I like you," she says. She touches Clarke's collarbone with a feather-light finger. "And it might help, if we hook up."

Clarke blinks. "What?" she says, and then she realizes that Lexa was right next to her back there, could read every expression on her face. "Oh." She frowns. "You don't care? That I-"

"Love is weakness," Lexa says. She waits a moment, then leans in again. But it doesn't seem so nice anymore.

The door bangs open, and they pull apart. Bellamy is occupying the doorway, blinking. Clarke realizes this is the men's room. She steps backwards, and Lexa's hands slide off of her and to her sides. Lexa looks between them, evidently decides that this is an appropriate time to leave. She raises an eyebrow at Clarke as she does, as if to keep the invitation open.

"Move," Clarke says.

Bellamy's eyes flick from Lexa's retreating form to Clarke, and he says, “Is this how it’s going to be now?”

She narrows her eyes. “Why?” she says coldly. “Are you jealous?”

He leans against the doorjamb, but it seems wrong. Not casual or cool or relaxed, but exhaustedly, like he needs it to keep him on his feet.

“I miss you,” he says.

She stares, brain fumbling. “I’m right in front of you,” she says stupidly.

“I miss you anyway,” he says. His gaze is steady. There’s a flush on his neck that means he’s had a few, but he’s not any drunker than she is. “I miss you so fucking much and I’m so—so _tired_ of missing you.” His hands hang limply by his sides. This is some version of the former him, before they fought and fucked and fucked up. “Can we stop now?” he asks. “Can we skip to the part where I love you and you love me?”

She wants to cry, but gags instead. Octavia comes looking for them and finds them crammed in one of the stalls, Clarke retching into the toilet and Bellamy holding back her hair.

“For fuck’s sake,” she says.

 

**August 14  
Berkeley**

Clarke doesn't go to say goodbye to The Grounders. She uses the excuse of making sure everything's packed into the van, but really she just sits there with her head leaned back and her hand over her eyes. Her brain feels like it's being hammered. Her chest feels even worse. She thinks about the person she wanted to be at this point, the timeline she'd drawn at age eleven. She thought she'd be interning at hospitals and getting her hands dirty. At least she's doing one of those things. _  
_

"Coffee?"

She peels open one eye and wills herself to see past the blinding light, takes in the sight of him with tousled hair and dark circles. She accepts the styrofoam cup with a muttered thanks.

"We should get going soon," he says, not looking at her. "It'll be a full day's drive, probably."

"Yeah," she says.

"It's just a few more weeks," he adds. He's really saying that they can pretend nothing happened, that nothing was said. He's really saying that they only have to do this dance for a little while longer. Clarke could take that out.

But she says, "I miss you, too."

He stares at her, opens his mouth, and then Octavia and Raven come back and they don't get the chance.

 

 **August 15  
** **On the Road**

When she wakes up it’s well past midnight. Octavia’s no longer behind the wheel. Instead it’s Bellamy in the driver’s seat, nodding along to the song quietly playing on the sound system. She recognizes it as one of his favorites, off the CD he burned while he was still refusing to learn how to put songs on iPods.

_The room is on fire while she’s fixing her hair_  
 _You sound so angry_  
 _Just calm down_  
 _You found me_

_I said please don’t slow me down…_

In the backseat Raven and Octavia are slumped together in sleep at awkward angles that they’ll complain about the second they wake. They’ve still got a ways to go. Last leg. Summer’s fading.

“Are they asleep?” he asks suddenly.

She looks more closely. Octavia’s twitching. Raven’s drooling. “Yes,” she answers.

The song patters on. It was one of her favorites, too.

He says, “You never asked me if I still—” He stops.

She doesn’t look at him, just curls her hands into her sweater. It’s sort of cold. Her head feels heavy, but doesn’t hurt as much as it should. “Do you?” she says.

He’s quiet, and then she can’t help but look. The mask is gone. “I don’t know how to stop,” he replies.

She feels a pull towards him, into him. “Bellamy,” she murmurs.

“I think I could figure it out," he says. "If you..." He stops again. They're supposed to be good with their words. It didn't used to be this hard.

She reaches out and pulls his hand off the steering wheel. He goes very still.

“We can stop now,” she whispers.

A few long seconds pass. Julian Casablancas is on the last verse. The car stops suddenly, and then he’s kissing her and it feels new, not rushed or angry or unappreciated but— _good_. Then Raven snores loudly in the back and they have to pull away to muffle laughter.

She thinks, with a flutter in her chest, that the road ahead looks less dark. She grins, first to herself, then at Bellamy. When the headlights of a passing car throw his face into full visibility, it’s for only a second, but the corner of his mouth is angled upwards.

He takes his foot off the brake.

 

**August 17  
On the Road**

"Any requests?" Raven asks, her hand hovering over her cell phone.

Octavia shoves her hand away. "Eyes on the road," she says, stealing the aux cord.

"Play something from AM," Clarke says. Bellamy's head is heavy in her lap. One of her legs has fallen asleep but she doesn't care. She's showered and brushed her teeth today and it's sunny without being hot. Everything's coming up Clarke Griffin.

 _"AM?"_ Octavia repeats dubiously. She turns around to look at Clarke judgmentally but it feels lighter than before, playful instead of serious.

Clarke rolls her eyes. "I will let you blast 'Crawl' if you play 'Knee Socks' at least once."

"You're not the one with the aux cord," Octavia retorts.

Bellamy kicks Octavia's seat. "Play something off 1989," he calls. There's a purplish spot peeking out from under his shirt that Clarke put there and he's smiling.

Clarke scoffs. "You're such a fourteen-year-old."

He grins up at her. "You love me anyway," he says.

"Shut up," Raven groans at the same time that Octavia says, "You're both terrible."

Clarke just laughs, curls her fingers into Bellamy's hair. They keep driving.

**Author's Note:**

> Is it super obvious that I didn't put a lot of effort into background? I'm a mess and I'm really sorry.
> 
> I imagine their sound being somewhere between The Strokes and...oh, I don't know, The Drowners. That seems right. Honestly name any Strokes song and that's this fic's theme song.
> 
> I'm [bellaryblake](http://bellaryblake.tumblr.com) on tumblr.


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